After a fashion (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Seven Ages (RTE 1, Monday)
On This Rock (RTE 1 & BBC 1, Sunday)
Cry For Life (BBC 1, Wednesday)
Impeccably togged out, Robert O'Byrne, who has strutted his stuff at the catwalk end of this newspaper, fronted after a fashion. Accompanying opening shots of sashaying models, discoised diddley-eye music signalled that this was a programme about Irish fashion. In fact, it was the first episode in a six-part series on Irish fashion. Ironically and presumably unintentionally, it became an unlikely fable about the robust power of marketing and the fragile nature of creativity.
In fairness to O'Byrne, early on he correctly described fashion as "a blend of the commercial and the creative". He told us that £950 million worth of clothes was sold in Ireland last year and that exports of £350 million testified to the image of Ireland as a centre for fashion. Cut to black and white footage of 1950s Ireland: lazy traffic on Dublin's O'Connell Street, cinema queues. For all but a few, this was the era of the bought pattern and DIY sewing.
This opening episode concentrated on two of the few Irish designers who began in the 1950s: Irene Gilbert and Sybil Connolly. Connolly, the programme's pundits (who included Terry Keane) agreed, was a much sharper PR merchant and marketeer than Gilbert. None the less, that didn't prevent publicist Eleanor Lambert from describing Connolly as a person "who never gushed" and who became "one of the artists of the 20th century who created a beautiful, serene way of life". Hmmm!
Perhaps she was and did. As for gush, however, Connolly - at least in the extracts shown here - didn't appear lacking. "Just listen to the way she carefully employs her voice," O'Byrne had said of Connolly. I did. "A woodland setting, the play of light on leaves and water are (sic) echoed in these late day dresses," crooned Sybil in the sibilant tones of the RADA graduates of the period.
It sounded suspiciously like gush to me. By today's standards, such obvious marketing-speak is mild. But even in the 1950s, it can hardly have sounded plain, far less laconic. Therein, surely, is the kernel of fashion aesthetics: there is an undeniable aesthetic dimension to clothes but because there is a commercial element too, invariably the notional aesthetics are wildly inflated. Designing clothes may be an art but it is a much more limited art than marketing pretends.
Still, even half a century ago, the hard-sell echoed that of today. In its avaricious heart, the plush end of the fashion industry prizes status above aesthetic concerns. It tries to confuse the issue by pretending that these are synonymous. Consequently, the observations of accountancy, social science and common sense are at least as valuable as those of art appreciation when it comes to fashion. Sybil Connolly, said a contributor named Clodagh, engaged in "selling an image of Ireland as an elegant Georgian house and everything that would go into it, from the black tie dinners to the ball gowns to the afternoon tea to the hunt breakfasts".
How evocative of 1950s Ireland - the scramble after a black-tie dinner or a hunt breakfast to pack your wellies into a cardboard suitcase and head for Holyhead. OK, that's facetious. But it is only fair to say that haute couture, seeking exclusivity in hand-me-down aristocratic values, has not only been snobbish but revels in snobbery. Sybil Connolly described the aim of her creations as seeking "the look of casual elegance by day and romantic dreaminess by night". Is that the language of art or of Mills and Boon?
Anyway, such considerations aside, Robert O'Byrne appears to have made a competent, occasionally even elegant little series although it does seem to accept the PR of fashion too much on its own narrow and often disingenous terms. Still, because it can mainline straight to the ego, fashion is a much followed branch of commercial art. The pity is that too often it treats itself as though it were the aesthetic equivalent of the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. But as pictorial history - a coffee-table book on television - after a fashion seems likely to satisfy most interested punters.
There was a moment in Seven Ages when Charlie Haughey, an ex-taoiseach and ex-paramour of Terry Keane, who, in shirts at least, favoured French fashion, was asked about the source of his wealth. "I'm not going into that," he said. Well, it wasn't likely that he would. Looking at the 1980s and 1990s, the series ended this week. With so many of the principals still alive, we had reached the point where there was a narrowing distinction between history and current affairs.
In that sense, the cold gaze of historical perspective was compromised. The 1980s were characterised, not unreasonably but perhaps a little excessively, as a contest between Haughey and Garret FitzGerald. At the top, we heard a rendition of the would-be rousing but thoroughly embarrassing Arise And Follow Charlie. We know, of course, that many great patriots did just that, amassing personal, tax-avoiding fortunes along the way. The prostitution of big politics to big business represented "the subversion of the state from the inside", said Fintan O'Toole.
So it did. We saw again Haughey's seminal broadcast of January, 1980 - the one in which he told us all that "as a community, we are living way beyond our means". Perhaps it was those shirt-buying sprees in Paris which prompted this late 20th-century equivalent of "let them eat cake". Whatever the cause, the sheer effrontery of the sermon remains breathtaking: a dodgy millionaire hectoring hard-pressed people about their extravagance.
It's easy now to see it, of course. But 20 years ago, Charlie Haughey was not only a formidable but a practically untouchable power. "Quite a number of people were genuinely terrified," said Des O'Malley, who recounted a story about an anti-Haughey TD being beaten up in Leinster House. Still, the unhealed scar of the civil war kept many people voting for Charlie because, ideologically, the switch to support Garret FitzGerald felt treasonous, if not heretical.
The 1980s also brought us Maggie Thatcher. "She was an English nationalist," said Garret FitzGerald, pointing out that, at heart, Maggie was never really a unionist. It was a fair point, although people from the north of England might reasonably argue that Thatcher was rather narrower than that - a Home Counties bully, actually. We knew she preferred FitzGerald to Haughey, but whether our knowing this was to FitzGerald's benefit is another matter.
The election of Mary Robinson to the presidency represented, said a contributor, "the defeat of the old order". In some respects, it did. But Brian Lenihan's fibs on live television represented the old order shooting itself. We didn't get to see Lenihan's excruciating interview with Sean Duignan. This was a questionable omission and it may leave the record distorted. There's enough self-congratulation in contemporary Ireland without pretending that in 1990 we were more liberal than we were.
And so we jigged along to the Ireland of the Tiger, Riverdance and revelations of long-running scandals. In May 1998, The Economist magazine had termed Ireland "the poorest of the rich countries". Nine years later, as far as the magazine was concerned, Ireland had become "Europe's shining light". The irony of it all is that with growing disparities between the wealthy and the poor, many among the new rich of the Riverdance generation seem to have fully understood the feather-your-own-nest implications of following Charlie's lead.
So Seven Ages has ended. It has been a highlight of the TV year but there are other Irish voices which might have been made more central. The so-called feckless, lavish-spending PAYE workers of 1980; people struggling in urban ghettoes and on small farms; emigrants, refugees and marginalised groups - all might have been consulted more. Still, in terms of splendid technique and for showing the quasi-feudal, dynastic nature of Irish politics (families with clout) it's been illuminating and often compelling.
On This Rock recalled the time when it was fashionable to collect money for "the black babies". (As I recall, used postage stamps and tinsel paper were also collected for the same purpose but the reason has always remained a mystery to me.) In an episode titled To The Ends Of The Earth, the series examined the history of the Irish Christian missions. It's now clear to all but the most reactionary that there was an imperialism within the project which couldn't but turn Christ into a white colonialist.
In the heyday of the missions, of course, few people thought like that. While Irene Gilbert and Sybil Connolly were designing in Dublin, it was accepted that Irish missionaries were bringing not only the word of God but superior cultural values to people who otherwise faced damnation. Sister Lelia Cleary, professed in the Medical Missionaries of Mary in 1956, was sent to Africa shortly afterwards. Almost half a century later, she's still in Africa and is now grappling with the moral difficulties posed by not opposing local traditions.
If Western absolutism is clearly wrong in inflicting itself on other cultures, how about the relativism of saying nothing about, say, female circumcision? It's a difficult call. If a custom seems genuinely barbaric must it still be unopposed in the name of saving indigenous culture? It was engaging to hear about the newer dilemmas of missionary work but the overall topic deserves not just a programme, but a series. The story of Ireland's attempt to save the souls of millions is difficult to squeeze into 40 minutes.
Finally, Cry For Life. This was a full-blown horror story which featured a domestic monster almost beyond belief. Len Carter, a gun fanatic, who would sit in his Kent home with a Dobermann each side of him, murdered his wife Loraine Whiting in 1995 after she managed to escape from him and years of extreme abuse. Following beatings, assaults and daily humiliations, Loraine bolted. However, she was quite literally hunted down by Carter. He had told her that if she ever ran away, he would find her, gouge out one of her eyes and shoot her in both legs to cripple her.
When he did track her down to a friend's house, he blasted her in the legs three times with a shotgun before turning it on himself. As she bled to death, she told police on the phone that Carter was dead. In fact, she told them 31 times over 43 minutes. Fearing that Carter was alive and forcing her to say otherwise, the police dithered. As they reached her, Loraine died from loss of blood. "I'm dying, I'm dying . . . it's a horrible way to die," she had been telling the coppers. Legitimately disturbing TV, it might have been exploitative but wasn't.